The Curious Engineer

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Blog System/5

blogsystem5.substack.com

A newsletter on operating systems, build systems, programming languages, software engineering, and my own software projects. Specifics include FreeBSD, Linux, Rust, Bazel and EndBASIC. Click to read Blog System/5, by Julio Merino, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

OS / kernelLinux / UnixRustDev tools / editors / IDEsSoftware / engineering practice

’23’24’25’26
Posts
61 from 27 Oct 2023 to 21 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (12 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/feed

2026 9

  1. BazelCon 2026 recap
  2. An old-new take on argument parsing in Rust
  3. Autoconf’s revenge: ad-hoc shell templates
  4. Is anyone still using Emacs?
  5. A Markdown-based test suite
  6. What if there was no BASIC in EndBASIC?
  7. I think AI is pushing me toward the AGPL
  8. Reflections on vibecoding ticket.el
  9. Grumpy Julio plays with CLI coding agents

2025 17

  1. ssh-agent broken in tmux? I've got you!
  2. From Azure Functions to FreeBSD
  3. BazelCon 2025 recap
  4. You are holding BUILD files wrong
  5. Bazel and glibc versions
  6. Trusting builds with Bazel remote execution
  7. Understanding Bazel remote caching
  8. Bazel and action (non-) determinism
  9. Lessons along the EndBOX journey
  10. Whatever happened to sandboxfs?
  11. Beginning 3D printing
  12. The next generation of Bazel builds
  13. Bazel at Snowflake two years in
  14. Hardware discovery: ACPI & Device Tree
  15. ioctls from Rust
  16. Hands-on graphics without X11
  17. Self-documenting Makefiles

2024 20

  1. Revisiting the NetBSD build system
  2. Synology DS923+ vs. FreeBSD w/ZFS
  3. Demystifying secure NFS
  4. BazelCon 2024 recap
  5. The costs of the i386 to x86-64 upgrade
  6. Revisiting the DOS memory models
  7. Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
  8. Picking glibc versions at runtime
  9. Kyua graduates
  10. Rust doesn't solve the CrowdStrike outage
  11. EndBASIC 0.11 is here
  12. 20 years of blogging
  13. Porting the EndBASIC console to an LCD
  14. How "new type" helps avoid production outages
  15. Links: February 2024 edition
  16. To C or not to C
  17. Running GNU on DOS with DJGPP
  18. Beyond the 1 MB barrier in DOS
  19. Links: January 2024 edition
  20. From 0 to 1 MB in DOS

2023 15

  1. Links: December 2023 edition
  2. The IDEs we had 30 years ago... and we lost
  3. Bazel interview at Software Engineering Daily
  4. Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines
  5. A CLI text editor? In my Windows?
  6. Strings, encodings, NULs and Bazel
  7. Links: November 2023 edition
  8. Windows NT: Peeking into the cradle
  9. Code reviews: A success story
  10. SSH agent forwarding and tmux done right
  11. Why do I know shell, and how can you?
  12. End-to-end tool testing with Bazel and shtk
  13. Links: October 2023 edition
  14. BazelCon 2023 et al. trip report
  15. Hello, Blog System/5!